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      The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

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      As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”Wait. What?While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?A note on reader mailI want to end this newsletter with a note of thanks. I deeply appreciate your emails. Every week I receive an avalanche of thoughtful responses, some encouraging, some critical. I want you to know that while I can’t respond to them all, I do read every single email. If you care enough to take the time to write, the least I can do is take the time to read. Thank you, truly, for your thoughts. More

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      Can Liberalism Save Itself?

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      Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen to be in trouble.It wasn’t long ago that liberals were proclaiming the “end of history” after their Cold War victory. But for years liberalism has felt perpetually on the brink: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists and a sense of blockage and stagnation.Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was in that era when liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.Yet just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the mid-20th century’s crises. Having witnessed the agonizing destruction of Germany’s brief interwar experiment with democracy, liberals saw their Communist ally in that battle against fascism converted into a fearful enemy. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers like the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to make freedom more credible to more people — for example, by promising a bright future of their own — these liberals prioritized a fight against mortal enemies who might crash the system.This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, fear was understandable: Liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the Communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty incurred its own risks. Anyone hostage to fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous his foes actually are, to overreact to the looming threat they pose and to forsake better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to beat the Nazis only to see paranoia spoil the country he volunteered to save.)During the Cold War, concern for liberty from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not just to the loss of the very freedom liberals were supposed to care about at home, it also prompted violent reigns of terror abroad as liberals backed authoritarians or went to war in the name of fighting Communism. Millions died in the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its proxies fighting in the name of “freedom.”Frustratingly, the Soviet Union was making the kinds of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised a world of freedom and equality in their stead. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, though concerned about possible excesses of government, imagined democracy as a form of politics that offered startling new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets both to emancipate and to equalize, they eventually struggled to correct this mistake. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill helped invent socialism, too.The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal swear word for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders helped revive it). Liberals concluded that the ideological passions that led millions around the world to Communism meant that they should refrain from promising emancipation themselves. “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” the Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling explained.The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.A great referendum on liberalism kicked off in 2016, after Mr. Trump’s blindsiding election victory. In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watch, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals into their stance in the first place — have attracted a Cold War posture. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, the rhetoric out of Washington increasingly treats China as a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has once again made Eastern Europe a site of struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to claim that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.But look closer to home and that seems more dubious. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Mr. Trump’s many prosecutors manages to convict him, this will not rescue American liberalism. The challenge cuts deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy if it is not reimagined.Since his election in 2020, Mr. Biden has been championed by some pundits — and by his administration itself — as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were. Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”Mr. Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply-side liberalism, doesn’t seem to have internalized the message. And for their part, voters do not yet seem fully convinced. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had it, revolving not around fear of enemies but hope in institutions that lead to what Mill called “experiments in living.” He meant that people everywhere would get the chance from society to choose something new to try in their short time. If their hands are forced — especially by a coercive and unequal economic system — they will lose what is most important, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.If there is any silver lining in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it is that it provides yet another opportunity for liberals to reinvent themselves. If they double down instead on a stale Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally makes good on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and thrive.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” More

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      Guatemala’s Anti Corruption Crusader is on Cusp of Presidency

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      Can an intellectual on an anti-graft crusade win the presidency in a nation sliding toward authoritarianism? Guatemala is about to find out.Bernardo Arévalo had been enjoying a quiet and predictable life for nearly a decade with his family in Geneva, working on pro-democracy issues for a nonprofit. That placid existence ended after he returned to his homeland, Guatemala, and got drawn into politics.Today, whenever Mr. Arévalo appears in public, he attracts throngs to hear him assail the government’s attacks on Guatemala’s democracy.Flanked by a well-armed security detail after receiving death threats following the assassination last week of a presidential candidate in Ecuador — which sent tremors across Latin America — Mr. Arévalo wears a bullet-resistant vest and travels in an armored S.U.V.Now, in what is building into a watershed moment for Central America’s most populous country, Mr. Arévalo, a Hebrew- and French-speaking polyglot with a doctorate in sociology, is on the cusp of winning the presidency in a runoff on Sunday — an implausible scenario just months ago.“Bernardo is a glitch in the matrix,” said Edgar Ortíz Romero, a constitutional law expert and one of Guatemala’s top political risk analysts, calling Mr. Arévalo “the most progressive candidate to get this far since 1985,” when democracy was restored in the country after more than three decades of military rule.Citing moves by the nation’s electoral agency before the first round of voting in June to disqualify every serious candidate who could challenge the conservative establishment, Mr. Ortíz Romero added: “His emergence is something I never saw coming, that no one saw coming. Had that been the case, they would have disqualified him, too.”After his unexpected showing in the first round, polls suggest a landslide win for Mr. Arévalo, 64, the candidate of a small party comprised largely of urban professionals like university professors and engineers, over Sandra Torres, a former first lady considered a standard-bearer for the conservative establishment.Still, doubts persist around the results, especially because polls failed to foresee Mr. Arévalo’s earlier performance, and around whether Ms. Torres’s supporters will interfere with the voting in a country where elections are regularly marred by such attempts.Sandra Torres, a former first lady and the leading conservative candidate, has a strong base of supporters among rural voters. Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesMr. Arévalo has also come under withering attacks, including suggestions that he supports communism.Nevertheless, his surging anticorruption campaign points to a rare opening to push back against authoritarian tactics that have forced into exile dozens of judges and prosecutors focused on fighting corruption, raising fears that Guatemala is sliding into autocratic rule.His rise has been helped by deepening fatigue, in one of Latin America’s most unequal countries, with a political system in which entrenched elites enrich themselves and are seen as operating above the law.Guatemala’s current president, Alejandro Giammattei, who is prohibited by law from seeking re-election, has overseen the persecution of judges, nonprofits and journalists. His predecessor, Jimmy Morales, shut down an international body that had been prosecuting graft in Guatemala after his brother and son were arrested on corruption charges.Even Mr. Arévalo, the son of a revered Guatemalan president who is still exalted in textbooks for creating the country’s social security system and guaranteeing freedom of speech, seems a little surprised by the turn of events.In an interview this week at his aging art-deco home in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, Guatemala City, Mr. Arévalo, goateed and wearing a blue blazer and colorful socks, recounted how he arrived at this moment.Mr. Arévalo is the son of a revered former president who established social security in Guatemala.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesBorn in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father took his family to live in exile after his successor as president was toppled in a 1954 C.I.A.-backed coup, Mr. Arévalo was raised in Venezuela, Mexico and Chile before his family could return to Guatemala, where he attended high school.After his father became ambassador to Israel, Mr. Arévalo started wandering again. He learned Hebrew as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and studied political sociology in Europe, obtaining a doctorate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He returned to Guatemala to work as a diplomat, eventually becoming ambassador to Spain.Then he moved his family to Switzerland, where Mr. Arévalo worked for Interpeace, a nonprofit assisting post-conflict societies. Based in Geneva, he occasionally worked in African countries before deciding to return to Guatemala in 2013.“I was never interested in electoral politics,” Mr. Arévalo said. But he also didn’t want to live out his days far from Guatemala. “I wanted to get involved.”When anticorruption protests exploded in 2015, leading to the president at the time resigning and then being jailed, Mr. Arévalo joined academics, writers and intellectuals to figure out ways to seize on the momentum. While some wanted to create a new political party, Mr. Arévalo sought to establish a research institute, recalled Román Castellanos, now a member of Congress.“Those wanting the party won the debate,” said Mr. Castellanos, who represents Semilla, or Seed, the party born from those discussions.Taking advantage of name recognition, Mr. Arévalo ran for elected office in 2019 for the first time, winning a seat for Semilla in Congress.He said he was not planning to run for president until internal voting in Semilla chose him as the party’s candidate. He was driving himself in an unarmored car to campaign events and polling in the low single digits before stunning his opponents — and even many of his supporters — when he placed second in the June election.Supporters of Mr. Arévalo gathered last month in Guatemala City. Mr. Arevalo could become the country’s first progressive leader in four decades.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesLuis von Ahn, the Guatemalan founder of the language-learning app Duolingo, said he was impressed by Mr. Arévalo’s intelligence and idealism, but when Semilla reached out for financing, he said no, believing the campaign would never gain traction.“I’m not in the practice of wasting money,” Mr. von Ahn said, describing Guatemala as a “land of sharks.” At the time, he said, he saw Mr. Arévalo as “your uncle who is an academic, who means well, but has no chance.”But after Mr. Arévalo made it to the second round, Mr. von Ahn changed his mind and contributed $100,000 to the party. He has also publicly offered to pay airfare for some of Mr. Arévalo’s most virulent critics, including officials entangled in graft scandals, to leave Guatemala, preferably for Panama, a historic destination for disgraced politicians.Guatemala’s conservative establishment has mounted an intense effort to undermine Mr. Arévalo. Shortly after the first round, Rafael Curruchiche, a prosecutor who has himself been placed by the United States on a list of corrupt Central American officials, sought to suspend Mr. Arévalo’s party.Rafael Curruchiche, a prosecutor who has been labeled as corrupt by the U.S. government, has sought to suspend Mr. Arévalo’s party, claiming irregularities in signatures gathered by the party.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesBut that move backfired, producing calls across the ideological spectrum in Guatemala for Mr. Arévalo to be allowed to run.Still, Mr. Curruchiche this week resurrected his plan, citing allegations of irregularities in Semilla’s gathering of signatures and warning that arrests could take place after Sunday’s voting.That’s just one challenge Mr. Arévalo faces. While he leads in the polls and is forecast to perform well in most of Guatemala’s cities, Ms. Torres, the former first lady, has her own considerable base of support, especially among rural voters who embrace her calls to expand social programs, including cash transfers to the poor.Mr. Arévalo promises to create a large public jobs program by improving services like water sanitation and also proposes increasing cash transfers, but has made rooting out corruption the centerpiece of his campaign.Smear campaigns on social media, especially on TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, have sought to paint Mr. Arévalo as supporting abortion and gay marriage.Ms. Torres also used an anti-gay slur to refer to Mr. Arévalo’s supporters (she later said she was not homophobic). Influential evangelical Christian pastors have insinuated that Mr. Arévalo supports communism and plans to close churches.But Mr. Arévalo noted in the interview that his party stood alone in Guatemala’s Congress in seeking to condemn the authoritarian tactics of Nicaragua’s nominally leftist government.Mr. Arévalo’s ascent has been helped by the questionable disqualification of other opposition candidates by the country’s electoral body. Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesMr. Arévalo added that he has no plans to legalize abortion or gay marriage. Still, if elected, he said his government would “not permit discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation.”The campaign has changed his life in other ways. Mr. Arévalo said he had recently become aware that Guatemala’s Department of Civil Intelligence, known as DIGICI, was “monitoring me and other people in this movement on orders of superiors.” A spokesman for the ministry overseeing the intelligence agency said Mr. Arévalo was not under surveillance.As concerns for his safety have grown in the campaign’s waning days, Mr. Arévalo has increased his security detail.While his campaign has resonated among younger, urban Guatemalans, he said he has had to lean on his political lineage to reach other voters.“Here we don’t have Lincolns or FDR’s, those figures who construct a sense of national belonging,” he said. “Even so, the figure of my father remains alive. That is crucial.” More

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      In Georgia, a Test of Rudy Giuliani’s Loyalty to Trump

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      Michelle Cottle and Donald Trump has been indicted, again. But this time, he’s got company. The Opinion writers Michelle Cottle and David French discuss why that makes this indictment different — and potentially more effective — than the others.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.This Times Opinion Short was produced by Phoebe Lett. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski and Derek Arthur. More

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      With the Latest Trump Indictment, Mind These Lessons From the South

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      With her sweeping indictment of former President Donald Trump and over a dozen co-conspirators, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis is now set to prosecute her case in a court of law. Just as important, it is essential that she and others continue to explain to the American public why the decision serves a critical purpose beyond the courts and for the health of our constitutional order.The indictment should be situated in the broader arc of American political development, particularly in the South. That history justifies using the criminal justice system to protect the democratic process in Georgia — a critical swing state — for elections now and in the future.We have the benefit of hindsight to heed the great lesson of the Reconstruction era and the period of redemption that followed: When authoritarians attack democracy and lawbreakers are allowed to walk away from those attacks with impunity, they will try again, believing there are no repercussions.We should not make those mistakes again.The period after the American Civil War entrenched many of America’s political ills. Ex-confederates were welcomed back into the body politic without meaningful penance. There were vanishingly few arrests, trials and lengthy punishments. Suffering minimal political disabilities, they could muster enough power to “redeem” Southern governments from biracial coalitions that had considerable sway to remake the South.Examples of democratic decay were regrettably abundant. An early sign occurred in Louisiana. With a multiracial electorate, Reconstruction Louisiana held great promise. During contentious state elections in 1872, Louisiana Democrats intimidated Black voters from casting ballots and corruptly claimed victory. The disputed election spurred political violence to assert white supremacy, including the Colfax Massacre in 1873, where as many as 150 Black citizens were killed in Grant Parish when a white mob sought to take control of the local government.Federal prosecutors brought charges against a number of the perpetrators. But in 1876, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Cruikshank that the federal government could not prosecute private violence under the 14th Amendment because it could only protect citizens against constitutional rights violations by state actors. By its decision, the court gave license to mobs to disrupt the peaceful transition of power with grave consequences.South Carolina could have been a Reconstruction success story. Its state constitution and government reflected the values and priorities of its Black majority. The planter elite attacked the Reconstruction government as a socialist rabble and baselessly mocked elected officials as incompetent. In the lead-up to elections in 1876, political violence brewed across the state, and Democrats secured a narrow victory. But democratic decay was precipitous. Over time, South Carolina imposed new limits on voting, moving precincts into white neighborhoods and creating a confusing system. Legislators passed the Eight Box Law, which required voters to submit a separate ballot for each elected office in a different box and invalidated any votes submitted in the wrong box. This created a barrier to voting for people who could not read.The lack of repercussions for political violence and voter suppression did little to curb the impulse to crush biracial democracy by mob rule. The backsliding spread like cancer to Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina.In Georgia, just before the state was initially readmitted to the Union, Georgians elected a Republican to the governorship and a Republican majority to the state senate. Yet the promise of a strong Republican showing was a mirage. Conservative Republicans and Democrats joined forces to expel more than two dozen Black legislators from the Georgia General Assembly in September 1868. From there, tensions only grew. Political violence erupted throughout the state as elections drew closer that fall, most tragically in Camilla, where white supremacists killed about a dozen Black Georgians at a Republican political rally.The democratic failures of that era shared three common attributes. The political process was neither free nor fair, as citizens were prevented from voting and lawful votes were discounted. The Southern Redeemers refused to recognize their opponents as legitimate electoral players. And conservatives abandoned the rule of law, engaging in intimidation and political violence to extinguish the power of multiracial political coalitions.At bottom, the theory behind the Fulton County indictment accuses Mr. Trump and his allies of some of these same offenses.The phone call between Mr. Trump and the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” Mr. Trump demanded) is crucial evidence backing for a charge relating to soliciting a public officer to violate his oath of office. Mr. Trump’s coercive tactics persisted even though he should have known that Joe Biden fairly won the state’s Electoral College votes. But facts never seemed to matter. Mr. Trump’s false allegation of a rigged contest — a claim he and others made well before voting began — was grounded in a belief that opposition to his re-election was never legitimate.Mr. Trump and his allies could not accept that an emerging multiracial coalition of voters across the state rejected him. Election deniers focused on Atlanta, a city whose Black residents total about half the population, as the place where Georgia’s election was purportedly stolen. The dangerous mix of racial grievance and authoritarian impulses left Trump loyalists feeling justified to concoct the fake electors scheme and imploring the General Assembly to go into a special session to arbitrarily undo the will of Georgians.Political violence and intimidation are some of the most obvious symptoms of democratic decay. The charges in Fulton County are an attempt to use the criminal justice system to repudiate political violence.The sprawling case is stronger because the conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results was replete with acts of intimidation by numerous people. Mr. Trump and Rudy Giuliani engaged in a full-scale harassment campaign against Fulton County election workers when they baselessly alleged that two individuals added fake votes to Mr. Biden’s tally. Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Raffensperger and a state employee with “a criminal offense” if they declined to join his corruption, warning them they were taking “a big risk.” A healthy democracy cannot tolerate this behavior.Democracy is not guaranteed, and democratic backsliding is never inevitable. The country avoided the worst, but the past few years have still been profoundly destabilizing for the constitutional order in ways akin to some of the nation’s darker moments.Indeed, the case by Ms. Willis can be seen as an effort to avoid darker moments in the future, especially for a critical swing state like Georgia. We should remember the words in 1871 of Georgia’s first Black congressman, Jefferson Franklin Long, who spoke out when Congress debated relaxing the requirements for restoring certain rights to ex-Confederates without meaningful contrition: “If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men … I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”His prediction proved all too accurate. It now may be up to the people of Fulton County to stop election denialism’s widening gyre.Anthony Michael Kreis is an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, where he teaches and studies constitutional law and the history of American politics.Source photographs by Bettmann, Buyenlarge, and Corbis Historical, via Getty.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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      When the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and over a dozen of his allies for their attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results, she did something ingenious.In contrast to the special counsel Jack Smith’s latest laser-focused federal indictment of Mr. Trump, Ms. Willis charges a wide range of conspirators, from people in the Oval Office to low-level Georgia G.O.P. functionaries, and is the first to plumb the full depths, through a state-focused bathyscaph, of the conspiracy.Her case also provides other important complements to the federal matter: Unlike Mr. Smith’s case, which will almost certainly not be broadcast because of federal standards, hers will almost certainly be televised, and should Mr. Trump or another Republican win the White House, Ms. Willis’s case cannot be immediately pardoned away. It offers transparency and accountability insurance. As she said in her news conference on Monday night, “The state’s role in this process is essential to the functioning of our democracy.”But the indictment stands out, above all, because Georgia offers uniquely compelling evidence of election interference — and a set of state criminal statutes tailor-made for the sprawling, loosely organized wrongdoing that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators are accused of engaging in. It is a reminder of the genius of American federalism: When our democracy is threatened, states have an indispensable part to play in protecting it.At 98 pages, Ms. Willis’s indictment is more than twice the size of Mr. Smith’s indictment in his Jan. 6 case and contains 19 defendants to his one. The indictment charges 41 counts (to Mr. Smith’s four) — among them, Georgia election crimes like solicitation of violation of oath by public officer (for Mr. Trump’s infamous demand to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to just “find 11,780 votes”) and state offenses like forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery (for creating fake electoral certificates) and conspiracy to commit computer trespass (for unlawfully accessing election machines in Coffee County to attempt to prove that votes were stolen).The large cast of defendants populates a complete conspiracy chain of command and features the famous (Mr. Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani), the infamous (the Trump attorneys John Eastman, Ken Chesebro and Jeffrey Clark) and the otherwise unknown (including Georgia state false electors and local Trump campaign allies without whom the plot would have stalled).Ms. Willis ties them all together by levying one charge against Mr. Trump and each of the 18 other defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO, accusing Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators of functioning as a criminal gang.American law has long recognized through the crime of conspiracy that combinations of criminals are more dangerous than lone wolves. RICO is conspiracy on steroids, providing for stiffer penalties and other advantages like bringing multiple loosely connected conspiracies under one umbrella.Georgia has one of the most capacious RICO statutes in the country. The state’s legislature enacted it specifically to “apply to an interrelated pattern of criminal activity” and mandated courts to “liberally construe” it to protect the state and its citizens from harm. Under the law, prosecutors can charge a sprawling criminal enterprise and even include individuals who may not have known “of the others’ existence,” as one court put it.Here, the statute may be triggered by violations of an array of federal crimes as well as over 40 charges specific to Georgia, including forgery, false statements and influencing witnesses.Georgia RICO has become Ms. Willis’s signature. She applied it in cases like the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal, in which educators engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to inflate scores on standardized tests, and the prosecution of the rapper Young Thug, in which he co-founded a street gang that was accused of committing almost 200 criminal acts.In using RICO, Ms. Willis accuses Mr. Trump of functioning like a gang leader overseeing a theft ring, except instead of stealing cash or cars, he and his allies are accused of attempting to purloin the Georgia presidential election results.The overall charge includes four core schemes. The first was to pressure government officials to advance the objective of securing Georgia’s electoral votes for Mr. Trump, even though he lost. For the evidence here, in addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis details other efforts by Mr. Trump and his co-defendants — including Mr. Giuliani’s pressuring of state legislators, Mr. Meadows’s pressure on election authorities and the co-conspirators’ lies and intimidation targeting the ballot counters Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, who goes by Shaye. This also includes efforts in Washington that affected Georgia, such as the Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark’s preparation of an allegedly fraudulent draft letter targeting the state.Two-person audit boards working to recount ballots at the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections in Lawrenceville, Ga.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe second scheme was the organization of electors falsely proclaiming that Mr. Trump was the winner in Georgia. Ms. Willis alleges that Mr. Trump personally participated in this effort; for example, he called the Republican National Committee with Mr. Eastman from the White House to organize the fake slates of electors, including in Georgia. And she charges a great deal of other activity in and outside Georgia.The third scheme was the unlawful accessing of voting machines in Coffee County, a rural county southeast of Atlanta. The indictment asserts that, after a White House conversation about getting access to election machines to prove supposed vote theft, Sidney Powell, a lawyer tied to Mr. Trump, along with Trump campaign allies and computer consultants, conspired to gain access to voting equipment in Coffee County.Ms. Willis’s inclusion of that plan spotlights what has been one of the more neglected aspects of the nationwide effort. Mr. Smith does not even mention it in his federal indictment. Yet the Willis indictment alleges that this was part of a plan discussed (in general terms) in the Oval Office.The fourth and final scheme is what has become a trademark allegation against Mr. Trump and his circle: obstruction and cover-up. Ms. Willis alleges that members of the conspiracy filed false documents, made false statements to government investigators and committed perjury during the Fulton County judicial proceedings.In addition to the RICO charges, each of the 19 defendants is charged with at least one other offense. Perhaps most telling among these is the charge against Mr. Trump and six others of felony solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer. This fits Mr. Trump’s demand for those 11,780 votes like a glove.Mr. Trump has already begun to defend himself, trying to get Ms. Willis and her special grand jury disqualified, based on an array of supposed conflicts and other grievances. The Georgia courts have already repeatedly rejected those arguments. He will also probably employ defenses similar to ones he and his legal team have laid out in pending criminal matters elsewhere, seeking removal to federal court and advancing First Amendment and intent defenses that have been picked apart by many legal experts.He and his co-conspirators may attempt to challenge the RICO charges on technical grounds, for example, arguing that the conspiracies are not sufficiently related under the statute. But Ms. Willis powerfully alleges otherwise, in particular emphasizing the unifying objective of Mr. Trump’s wrongfully seizing Georgia’s electoral votes.That all of this is likely to play out on television only deepens the historic nature of the indictment. Georgia law makes generous allowance for court proceedings to be broadcast, with the state rightly considering open courtrooms to be “an indispensable element of an effective and respected judicial system.” Assuming that rules against televising federal trials stand, the Georgia trial would be the only one that the public could watch as it unfolds. We know from the Jan. 6 hearings — as well as, in an earlier era, the Watergate hearings — the power of seeing and hearing these events. And they will remain for viewing in posterity as a lesson in the rule of law.There is one final important advantage of the Georgia case. It is shielded from what may be Mr. Trump’s ultimate hope: the issuance of a pardon should he or another Republican be elected president in 2024 (or a command by a Republican that the Justice Department simply drop the case). A president’s power to pardon federal offenses does not extend to state crimes.And pardons in Georgia are not an unreviewable power vested solely in the chief executive. They are awarded by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles — and are not even available until five years after completion of all sentences.The indictment from Ms. Willis strongly complements the federal case. It adds dimensionality, transparency and additional assurance of accountability for the former president and those who betrayed democracy in Georgia.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate attorney in Savannah, Ga.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Has a Gimmick That Republicans Are Sure to Love

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      Vivek Ramaswamy is a 38-year-old investor and former pharmaceutical executive who wants to be the Republican nominee for president. He’s not ahead by any means, but he’s doing better than you might expect. If Donald Trump dominates the field and Ron DeSantis is the far runner-up, then Ramaswamy is the candidate poised to rise if the Florida governor falls further behind.Ramaswamy is “anti-woke,” condemns Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday and says that “diversity is not our strength.” He thinks climate activism is a “cult” and wants to send the military to the border with Mexico. He wants to unravel the so-called deep state, thinks the Trump indictments are politically motivated and won’t say whether, if he were in Mike Pence’s shoes, he would have refused the former president’s demand to overturn the 2020 election results.In other words, he’s preoccupied by most of the same concerns as his rivals. But he does have one gimmick that DeSantis and Trump don’t: “We are a constitutional republic. We need to revive civic duty among young Americans,” Ramaswamy said on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “That’s why I’m announcing my support for a constitutional amendment to raise the voting age from 18 to 25, but to still allow 18-year-olds to vote if they either pass the same civics test required of immigrants to become naturalized citizens, or else to perform 6 months of military or first responder service.”Ramaswamy has elaborated in interviews on his call to raise the voting age for most young people. “I think we have a loss of civic pride in our country. I think people, young people included, do not value a country that they simply inherit,” he told NPR. “I think we value a country that we have a stake in building. And I think that asking a young person, asking any citizen, to know something about the country before voting, I think is a perfectly reasonable condition.”Demanding a de facto literacy test for most young Americans to vote is not actually a “perfectly reasonable condition.” It is a direct assault on the basic democratic rights of millions of citizens.To begin, there’s the fundamental fact that no aspect of political equality hinges on the ability to memorize trivia. What’s more, you do not need a formal education of any sort to embrace the duties of citizenship or to understand yourself as a political actor with a right to self-government. You do not even need one to understand your political interests and to work, individually or with others, to pursue them through our democratic institutions.To think otherwise is to believe that Americans, from the yeoman farmers of the early Republic to the freedmen of the Reconstruction South to the urban industrial workers of the early 20th century, have never been equipped to govern themselves.There’s also the practical fact that most new requirements for voting in the United States are — in intent and purpose — new restrictions on voting.For example, these days we take the secret ballot for granted as the only rational way to conduct an election. Of course the state should produce uniform, standard ballots for all elections. Of course we should vote in private. But for much of the 19th century before the introduction of the secret ballot — also known as the “Australian” ballot — American voters obtained their ballots from their political parties. “Since the ballots generally contained only the names of an individual party’s candidates, literacy was not required,” notes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” “All that a man had to do was drop a ballot in a box.”With a single, standardized ballot — cast in private without the assistance of a friend or relative or party representative — voters had to read to participate. That was the point. As one contemporaneous observer, George Gunton, an economist and social reformer, declared, “so obvious is the evil of ignorant voting that more stringent naturalization laws are being demanded, because too many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly. It is to remedy this that the Australian ballot system has been adopted in so many states.” Its purpose, he continued, was “to eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters.”We similarly take voter registration for granted — of course we should confirm our intention to vote with municipal authorities ahead of time. But that, too, was introduced to limit and restrict the electorate. “Beginning in the 1830s,” writes Keyssar, “the idea of registration became more popular, particularly among Whigs, who believed that ineligible transients and foreigners were casting their votes for the Democratic Party.” Sixty years later, Southern Democrats used highly discretionary registration laws to remove as many Republican-voting Blacks from the electorate as possible.“The key disfranchising features of the Southern registration laws were the amount of discretion granted to the registrars, the specificity of the information required of the registrant, the times and places set for registration, and the requirement that a voter bring his registration certificate to the polling place,” explained the political scientist J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.” “Registration laws were most efficiently used — as in South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina — to cut the electorate immediately before a referendum on constitutional disfranchisement.”We also can’t forget the actual literacy tests, introduced at the turn of the 20th century, that were designed to keep as many immigrants, Black Americans and laboring people from the polls as possible. The point was to limit, as much as possible, the political power of groups that might challenge the interests of those in power, from industrial barons in the North to large landowners in the South.Ramaswamy says that the goal of his proposal is to encourage civic pride and inculcate a deeper attachment to the country among the youngest American adults. But there are ways to do both without creating new obstacles to voting. There’s also no evidence or indication that a mandatory civics test would achieve the goal in question. When you consider, as well, the extent to which there are older adults — even elderly adults — who could use a little civic pride themselves, it appears that Ramaswamy’s proposal has less to do with fostering national cohesion and more to do with the Republican Party’s unenviable dilemma with young people.Democrats win most younger voters across all racial and ethnic groups. In the 2022 midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of voters under 30 backed Democrats compared with 31 percent for Republicans. And soon, young people will represent a majority of potential voters in the country.Rather than try to appeal to or persuade this bloc, Ramaswamy’s proposal is to remove a vast majority from the electorate altogether.To be clear, this isn’t a serious plan. The American public is so polarized along partisan and ideological lines as to make the Constitution effectively unamendable. Ramaswamy’s call to raise the voting age is a novelty policy for a novelty candidate. And yet it tells us something about the Republican electorate, and thus the Republican Party, that the eye-catching gimmick of an ambitious politician is a plan to disenfranchise millions of American voters.In many ways, big and small, the Republican Party has turned against the bedrock “republican principles” of majority rule and popular sovereignty. We see it in a governor removing a duly-elected official because he disagrees with the views she represents, a state legislature gerrymandering itself into a permanent majority regardless of where the votes fall, an entire state Republican Party trying (and failing) to change the rules of constitutional amendment to keep the voters from affirming their rights and a former president who would rather end the American experiment in democracy than accept defeat at the ballot box.Ramaswamy is playing the same song. There’s almost no one in the Republican Party, at this point, who isn’t.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      España va a estar bien tras las elecciones generales

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      Se elige entre democracia y autocracia.Así es como el presidente del gobierno español, Pedro Sánchez, de centroizquierda, enmarca las elecciones que se celebrarán este domingo. Cuando justificó su convocatoria de elecciones anticipadas, Sánchez estableció paralelismos entre España y otros países cuyas recientes elecciones estuvieron dominadas por el fantasma de un régimen iliberal de derechas. “Hay que aclarar”, dijo sobre la decisión de los españoles, “si quieren un presidente del gobierno de España al lado de Biden o de Trump, si quieren un presidente del gobierno del lado de Lula o de Bolsonaro”. Para no ser menos, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, principal oponente de Sánchez al frente del Partido Popular, conservador, lo acusó a él y a sus socios de coalición de izquierdas de actuar como “un régimen totalitario” y arropar a las autocracias latinoamericanas.Ambos mensajes se inscriben en un discurso más general que ve las elecciones como una contienda entre dos bloques polarizados —derecha e izquierda—, cada uno de los cuales alberga sectores extremos que condenarán al país. Gran parte de la inquietud se centra en Vox, un partido de extrema derecha que podría entrar en el gobierno como socio de coalición del Partido Popular y con ello, según algunas opiniones, poner en peligro la propia democracia española. Pero estos mensajes son desmesurados. Las elecciones del domingo determinarán el rumbo político de España en los próximos años, no la suerte que correrá su democracia.Para empezar, Sánchez no se enfrenta a un candidato trumpista. Feijóo, expresidente del gobierno de la región de Galicia, es un político conservador a la antigua usanza, que se caracteriza por su talante tranquilo y discreto. Desde que llegó a la presidencia del Partido Popular el año pasado, tras el liderazgo, propenso al escándalo y derechista, de Pablo Casado, ha dirigido el partido hacia el centro al tiempo que se ha ganado la fama de aburrido. “La alternativa serena”, es el lema no oficial de la campaña de Feijóo.Según los sondeos, Feijóo solo podría arrebatarle el poder a Sánchez en coalición con Vox, la tercera fuerza en el Congreso español, que ronda el 13 por ciento en las encuestas. Es la posibilidad de una coalición del Partido Popular y Vox lo que ha hecho saltar las alarmas, y con razón: Vox se opone al feminismo, los derechos LGBTQ+ y a cualquier intento de reexaminar las atrocidades contra los derechos humanos durante la Guerra Civil española y la dictadura del general Francisco Franco. También aboga por levantar una muralla alrededor de los enclaves españoles de Ceuta y Melilla para impedir la entrada de los migrantes del norte de África. De manera ominosa, ha planteado la propuesta de celebrar un referéndum nacional para prohibir los partidos separatistas.El altisonante lenguaje de Vox y sus propuestas políticas tóxicas suponen una grave amenaza para la democracia española, pero no tan existencial como muchos creen. Su entrada en un gobierno conservador convencional podría normalizar el partido, por ejemplo. Aun si esto obedeciese más al deseo que a la realidad, ayuda a no perder la perspectiva de las cosas. Vox entró en el Congreso español en 2019, y por primera vez en un gobierno regional en 2022, en una coalición liderada por el Partido Popular. Son logros importantes, sobre todo porque, hasta entonces, la extrema derecha carecía de representación en el poder legislativo nacional de España. Sin embargo, eso atestigua la inexperiencia del partido, que ocuparía una posición subalterna en una coalición.Hay una cuestión más general. El surgimiento de Vox —por llamativo que sea— no supuso ningún cambio significativo para la derecha española y la política en España. Contrariamente a lo que se suele pensar, la extrema derecha no desapareció con la muerte de Franco. Durante la transición a la democracia, entre 1977 y 1982, se aglutinó en torno a Alianza Popular, un partido neofranquista que obtuvo 16 escaños en las elecciones parlamentarias de 1977. A sus fundadores, derechistas ultracatólicos, se los llamaba “los siete magníficos” porque los siete eran antiguos ministros de Franco, entre ellos Manuel Fraga, ministro franquista de Información y Turismo que, siendo diputado, ayudó a redactar la Constitución española de 1978.A finales de la década de 1980, con la fundación del Partido Popular, la extrema derecha se incorporó al nuevo partido y pasó a influir en los futuros gobiernos conservadores y, entre otras cosas, impulsó durante el gobierno de José María Aznar un plan de humanidades que blanqueaba el papel de los conservadores en el ascenso de la dictadura de Franco y alentó el fallido intento de Mariano Rajoy de restringir los derechos de aborto. Animada por el auge de los partidos populistas de derechas en todo el mundo, la extrema derecha española ha decidido que puede salir tranquilamente de su escondite. Pero siempre estuvo ahí.Y lo que es más importante: la democracia española es lo bastante fuerte para soportar la participación de un partido de extrema derecha en un gobierno conservador. Aunque haya dejado de ser la excepción en Europa en lo que respecta a la extrema derecha, España sigue siendo diferente por una importante razón: es notablemente ajena a la temida patología política conocida como retroceso democrático, o erosión de las normas democráticas. La ausencia de dichos problemas en España se refleja en el “Freedom in the World Report”, de Freedom House, que clasifica la democracia española entre las más desarrolladas del mundo. Esto es especialmente reseñable, puesto que España cumple las dos condiciones que suelen reunir los países en retroceso democrático: una corta historia como democracia y una polarización extrema. Sin embargo, la democracia española, respaldada por un liderazgo estable, progresos sociales y económicos y una dinámica cultura política pluripartidista, se ha mantenido firme.Por supuesto, no es inmune a las amenazas. Una gran incógnita es qué papel desempeñará el separatismo en el próximo gobierno, incluso en el futuro del país. Todas sus fuerzas políticas explotan el separatismo para obtener ventajas partidistas. En los últimos años, la derecha —incluido el Partido Popular— ha ganado elecciones arremetiendo contra los separatistas, aunque eso le costase su hundimiento en Cataluña y el País Vasco, las regiones que albergan a los principales movimientos separatistas. La izquierda, a su vez, utiliza a Vox como espantajo para despertar los fantasmas del franquismo, sobre todo en las regiones separatistas, con la esperanza de espolear a sus partidarios. Por su parte, los separatistas enfrentan a la derecha con la izquierda en pro de sus muy estrictos objetivos, al tiempo que presentan injustamente a Madrid como opresora para reforzar sus reivindicaciones victimistas.Nada de esto es bueno para la democracia; de hecho, es francamente peligroso. En 2017, los separatistas catalanes sumieron a España en su crisis política más grave desde la muerte de Franco al celebrar un referéndum ilegal sobre la independencia. Que el país lograra capear la crisis —gracias en gran parte al hábil liderazgo de Sánchez— demostró al mundo que la democracia española, aunque fracturada, pude seguir funcionando mejor que bien. Sin embargo, también sirvió como advertencia de que uno de los mayores peligros en una sociedad democrática, incluso en una tan exitosa como la española, es dar por sentada la democracia.Omar G. Encarnación es profesor de Ciencias Políticas en el Bard College y autor de Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting, entre otros libros. More